Tell you what, I don't mind revealing to you that when I wrote to Noam Chomsky a couple of times about a year ago, he explained that "Hitchens is not worth taking seriously any more". I'll come back to that later. I was just reading some material on Abu Ghraib, and I couldn't help but being struck by some of the language being deployed by General Antonio Taguba, who has been charged with investigating the torture and rape of Iraqi inmates. Unreleased photographs clearly depict this rape taking place. He described a Military Policeman 'having sex' with a female Iraqi detainee. The rest of what he says, or is quoted as saying, appears as neutral description of appalling crimes. But that particular statement refers to rape.

Seymour Hersh famously reported that there was video evidence made of these assaults, and among them was the rape of children. Taguba's report appears to contain some substantiation for this claim:

I saw [name deleted] fucking a kid, his age would be about 15 - 18 years. The kid was hurting very bad and they covered all the doors with sheets. Then when I heard the screaming I climbed the door because on top it wasn't covered and I saw [name deleted] who was wearing the military uniform putting his dick in the little kid's ass. I couldn't see the face of the kid because his face wasn't in front of the door. And the female soldier was taking pictures. [name deleted], I think he is [deleted] because of his accent, and he was not skinny or short, and he acted like a homosexual (gay). And that was in cell #23 as best as I remember.

Another testimony alleging abuse of minors from a statement provided by Thaar Salman Dawod, Detainee #150427, on January 17, 2004:

I saw lots of people getting naked for a few days getting punished in the first days of Ramadan. They came with two boys naked and they were cuffed together face to face and Grainer was beating them and a group of guards were watching and taking pictures from top and bottom and there was three female soldiers laughing at the prisoners. The prisoners, two of them, were young. I don't know their names.

I return to Christopher Hitchens, whose lumpen insensitivity regarding the victims of American imperialism makes Taguba look like a fairy godmother. Addressing the layer of bumpkin billionaires that reads the Weekly Standard - which has to be the most intellectually retarded ruling class rag in America - he says: "Prison conditions at Abu Ghraib have improved markedly and dramatically since the arrival of Coalition troops in Baghdad." There follows the concession that, yes, the American troops were very very bad, but nevertheless "the improvement is still, unarguably, the difference between night and day". There is much much more one could say about Hitchens's comportment on such questions, but this will do for now, except to note that Hitchens can't seem to get his facts right on Abu Ghraib - or much else these days.

So far have we come - in blood, Stepp'd in so far that, should we wade no more, Returning were as tedious as go o'er. Martin Shaw remarks in his recent book, The New Western Way of War, that the argument over the war on Iraq was instantly cast by many of its defenders in terms of a corpse-trade. If Saddam killed more people during his approximately 24 year reign than were killed during the war, then the war was apparently worth it. Indeed, he notes, Blair staked much of his 'humanitarian' case for war on Iraq in these terms on February 15th 2003: if there are 500,000 marching today, it will be less than the number of Saddam's victims; if there are 1 million marching today... etc. Forget, if you like, that the West is co-responsible for the bulk of the massacres Saddam undertook. Forget that, as quite clearly many of the apologists have. And leave aside any qualms you have about the numbers killed by Saddam Hussein who would have had no moral issue about killing three or four times as many as he did. Corpse-trading is one thing, and its logical and moral flaws are obvious - but trading beating, rape and electrocution? I'll just venture that anyone who thinks that this amounts to a defense of the occupation of Iraq is at the very least mentally deranged. And the fact that a large number of people would accept it even as an argument points to the deranged condition of our present affairs.